In the problem space of long-term preservation of digital objects, the disciplined use of XML affords a reasonable solution to many of the issues associated with ensuring the interpretability and renderability of at least some digital artifacts. This paper describes the experience of Portico, a digital preservation service that preserves scholarly literature in electronic form. It describes some of the challenges and practices entailed in processing and producing XML for the archive, including issues of syntax, semantics, linking, versioning, and prospective issues of scale, variety of formats, and the larger infrastructure of tools and practices required for the use of XML for the long haul.

The Digital Curation Manual is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution -Non-Commercial -Share-Alike 2.0 License. © in the collective work -Digital Curation Centre (which in the context of these notices shall mean one or more of the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, the University of Bath, the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils and the staff and agents of these parties involved in the work of the Digital Curation Centre), 2005.© in the individual instalments -the author of the instalment or their employer where relevant (as indicated in catalogue entry below).The Digital Curation Centre confirms that the owners of copyright in the individual instalments have given permission for their work to be licensed under the Creative Commons license. Catalogue Entry DescriptionThe goal of digital curation is to ensure the appropriate usability of managed digital assets over time. Format is a fundamental characteristic of a digital asset that governs its ability to be used effectively. Without strong format typing a digital asset is merely an undifferentiated string of bits. The information content encoded into an asset's bits can only be interpreted properly and rendered in human-sensible form if that asset's format is known. While it is possible for bits to be preserved indefinitely without consideration of format, it is only through the careful management of format that the meaning of those bits remains accessible over time. This instalment investigates aspects of format description, validation, and characterisation that may assist with long-term curation and usability of data. Publisher Citation GuidelinesStephen Abrams, (October 2007), "File Formats", DCC Digital Curation Manual, S.Ross, M.Day (eds), Retrieved , from http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resource/curation-manual/chapters/file-formats About the DCCThe JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre (DCC) provides a focus on research into digital curation expertise and best practice for the storage, management and preservation of digital information to enable its use and re-use over time. The project represents a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow through HATII, UKOLN at the University of Bath, and the Council of the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC). The DCC relies heavily on active participation and feedback from all stakeholder communities. For more information, please visit www.dcc.ac.uk. The DCC is not itself a data repository, nor does it attempt to impose policies and practices of one branch of scholarship upon another. Rather, based on insight from a vibrant research programme that addresses wider issues of data curation and long-term preservation, it will develop and offer programmes of outreach and practical services to assist those who face digital curation challenges. It also seeks to complement and contribute towards the efforts of related organisations, rather than duplicate services. DCC -Digital Curation Manual Editors PrefaceThe Digital Curation Centr...

Institutions such as Portico that are engaged in ensuring that the digital record of our time is accessible, usable, discoverable, and verifiable for the very long term continually face the challenge of processing and managing content at very large scales, often with minimal, and sometimes diminishing, resources to accomplish the task. A key resource in meeting the challenge of preserving born-digital and digitized scholarly literature has been the NLM and JATS standards, and the community of practice centered on those standards. We will be talking about our shared experience in developing those standards: what motivated our participation, what benefits we have seen, and what challenges we still face.

No abstract